iRacing's Best kept secret

I been playing for weeks and only just found the TAB key does something rather great.

It gives three different options to tell you how you are in a lap or a sector along with an ingame slide bar that goes green for ahead of best time or red for behind. It also give you a display of time behind or infront of your best time.

These features i found by accident are awesome, when your trying to work out where you gaining or loosing time in practice or race its brilliant. If you take a different line into corners at least you can easily see where you either lost or gained time. True the old players would maybe know this but new players like me would not so its just a shout out for anyone who didnt know this great feature. Been suing it for a few days and its helped improve my lines and times. Sometimes the more outside line you wouldnt normaly take can gain you more time depending on car setup and how you drive.

just remember that it will have recorded your best and optimal times pre NTM, you'll need to reset the optimals in the split's black box at the lower right hand corner of the "at track" dashboard. Just above the chat window.

I guess most people skip right over the Getting Started Sections of iRacing, but they are very good. You can find more gems other than just the Split Times feature, which is awesome. I bet most of the new iRacers in the last 6 months (I think it came out 6 months ago and people talked about it alot then) don't know about it.

Maybe I should start a Begginer's Guide type thread. It might be helpful.

In Documents > iRacing > laptimes there are separate track folders which retain your times for each car.

There are usually 2 files in there for each car, a .blap and an .olap (these are BEST and OPTIMAL). If you don't have a .blap file this will be because you have not completed a full clean lap (no incidents) at the track in a particular car. Obviously the optimal time is all the best valid sector times put together.

You can simply delete all the track folders within the /laptimes folder and this will erase your best times for all the cars at the tracks. Then when you next race/practice, your split-times collection will start being built up again.